21 items | 5 visits
Ele Munjeli's List: Androids
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"We're cheap dates," she says. "If an entity makes eye contact with you, if an entity reaches toward you in friendship, we believe there is somebody there ... But that doesn't mean that there is. That just means that our Darwinian buttons are being pushed."
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Now, staring back at Nexi, I’m an instant robot apologist. I want to shower those clips with embarrassingly positive comments, to tell the haters and the doubters that the future of HRI is bright. There’s no way seniors will reject the meds handed to them by chattering, winking live-in-nurse bots.
Children, no doubt, will love day-care robots, even if the bots sometimes fail to console them, or grind to an unresponsive halt because of buggy software or faulty battery packs. To turn today’s faceless Roombas into tomorrow’s active, autonomous machine companions, social robots need only to follow Nexi’s example, tapping into powerful, even uncontrollable human instincts.
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That’s why Nexi’s metallic arms and hands are drifting around in small, lifelike movements. It’s why Nexi searches for faces and seems to look you in the eye. When it blinks again, with a little motorised buzz, I realize I’m smiling at this thing. I’m responding to it as one social, living creature to another. Nexi hasn’t said a word, and I already want to be its friend.
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